Geocities Shutting Down Today

Paolo DF writes "Geocities is closing today. Its advent in 1995 was a sign of the rising 'Internet for everyone' era, when connection speeds were 1,000x or 2,000x slower than is common today. You may love it or hate it, but millions of people had their first contact with a Web presence right here. I know that Geocities is something that most Slashdotters will see as a n00b thing — the Internet was fine before Geocities — but nevertheless I think that some credit is due. Heck, there's even a modified xkcd homepage to mark the occasion." Reader commodore64_love notes a few more tributes around the Web. Last spring we discussed Yahoo's announcment that Geocities would be going away.

Comments

Ah Geocities, farewell

[ZekoMal]

I'm a noob I s'pose; geocities was my entry into the internet. For me, that was how I learned all the HTML codes: I would type in what I thought would look good, check out the end result, then go back and fix it up. Most of the content wasn't that good, but you could find all sorts of little gems with enough searching. Can't even recall how many custom Doom/Heretic levels I found thanks to geocities...

Re:N00b thing?

[Amorpheus_MMS]

I'm sure fourteen years must be close to an Internet Millennium.

Geocities lead me to my wife

[Christoph]

I got an email from a stranger in the Philippines asking for help with a document she found on my website. I responded (somewhat begrudgingly), she thanked me. I followed a link to her Geocities homepage in her signature line, and (seeing her photos) began emailing her.

http://www.geocities.com/balene46/Photo_Gallery.html

We've been married four years now.
http://www.cgstock.com/personal/arlene_gregerson ...and have a great toddler.
http://www.cgstock.com/athena

Thanks, geocities.

Oh SiliconValley Peaks #3737

[EkriirkE]

I remember picking my neighborhood page, throwing up useless junk about how much macs suck and PC rule, animated GIFs for IChat, ICQ and webring. Then I wrote a program that drew visitors to my page and got me recognition in the weekly geocities digests for my traffic and a couple free tshirts (I still have one in the plastic wrapper, the other I wear as casual). They gave me more webspace and bandwidth as well. Then a year or so later Yahoo bought them up and started doling out vengeance against those who had active sites. This is when GeoCities truly died. All that we saw between then and now was postmortem random nerve firing. Yahoo routinely would shut down my site with tales of "Bandwidth exceeded"

Re:Internet Archived; Time to Move On

[Beardo the Bearded]

IIRC, I was under the CapeCanaveral directory, number 9799. I haven't even checked it in years.

I used Sizzling HTML Jalfezi and hand-coding to make my Geocities page. When they brought in the WYSIWYG editor, I was still using notepad to edit my pages. Those HTML skills have paid more than one bill and translated very handily to XML.

But that's not all. The skills I learned kludging my way through Geocities (and with Jalfrezi) still get used today. I write a handful of websites for the volunteer organizations I'm with, and more than one employer's website has been upgraded with a few of the things I learned from GC. It was a great sandbox where you could learn the basics of the web framework and HTML coding. Yeah, you couldn't host fark or /. on there, but it let you see how tables worked, what a page of animated GIFs looked like, and how to insert javascript into a website. Hey, I wore teal clothing because it was in style. Don't mock the GIF / MIDI that was the style at the time.

Finally, and this is the best part, it indirectly put me into contact with a woman I'd never met. After a little bit of contact, we went on a date. Long story short, we've been married for eleven years and have two kids.

We joke that the Internet (and I will capitalize it until they give away all my parts) created life.